Personally, I use Edlin - It's a manly man's editor - VI is for the weak - IDE's are for girly men

If you want to spend loads of time debugging and tracing compilation errors - you can do what you want. But with an IDE - It never took me more than 5 sec to correct my compilation errors (because I made none in the first place !?! Eclipse shows me those, when I type).

Hehehe - It was a joke - If you ever used Edlin you would know that trying to develop a program in it would be the programmers equivelant of the seventh circle of hell

Yeah, jCreator it is good wend you have slow computer (since it is C++) there is no startup impact and no need to tweak a JVM, also it is a good IDE for people that want to just code simple stuff with not to many wizards, it has a solid feature set (all the basic components are there) but i would not recommend it for everybody, it is missing allot of stuff for J2EE and J2ME, and also to develop Web Services...

Yeah, jCreator it is good wend you have slow computer (since it is C++) there is no startup impact and no need to tweak a JVM

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also it is a good IDE for people that want to just code simple stuff with not to many wizards, it has a solid feature set (all the basic components are there) but i would not recommend it for everybody

My opinion is a bit different, I will strongly recomend It

I think that heavy IDE hide too much things (like VisualBasic). It also help people to make dirty and incompatible code, It is always good to know what your code do really.

If your project is well designed, you should have only small informations transactions between its entities, and those components will be small and interchangeable. this will enable you to divide your main project in smaller projects and that recursively.

All those little projects can be handle with any kind of editor and for me the simplest (with nevertheless some functions) is the most attractive.

The design of your application is much more important than the editor you use. If you cannot make a project with a simple editor, this means that your project is maybe not well designed.

To finish, I will say that I know that Eclipse is a good IDE, but, starting to learn Java with it is really the worst thing to do.

I think that heavy IDE hide too much things (like VisualBasic). It also help people to make dirty and incompatible code, It is always good to know what your code do really.....

To finish, I will say that I know that Eclipse is a good IDE, but, starting to learn Java with it is really the worst thing to do.

I don't see this at all. What does Eclipse hide? What does Net Beans hide? The only thing I can think of is perhaps they hide how to use the command line tools.

Maybe there is an argument that NetBeans encourages you to make incompatible code, in the sense that it always pushes custom layout managers on you and the Ant files it uses for projects have all sorts of custom netbeans task in them, so you can't just use vanilla Ant to build your project.

The design of your application is much more important than the editor you use. If you cannot make a project with a simple editor, this means that your project is maybe not well designed.

Or your project is huge and being worked on by a team I agree a good design is the critical, but requirements often change during development. This is where a good IDE with strong refactoring can be a life saver. Also, for large projects (my team is working on one with over 4.5 millions lines of code) - the code navigation capabilities of an IDE become critical. Then there are the other benefits such as version control integration, local history, diff, searching, code completion, member/method displays, templated code, javadoc integration, etc. There are alot of reasons to use a robust IDE in my opinion.

First of all, I dont want to make offense to you or to your team , but, a project with more than 4.5 milion lines of code look suspicious for me especially in Java.

What is this huge project?

Dont you think if you are working on a big project, you must know your components inputs, outputs and functions, you should work on only one or two components at the same time or you are making some kind of RAD on a big project and over 4.5 milion lines of code (I agree that could be quite difficult)?

First of all, I dont want to make offense to you or to your team , but, a project with more than 4.5 milion lines of code look suspicious for me especially in Java.

What is this huge project?

Dont you think if you are working on a big project, you must know your components inputs, outputs and functions, you should work on only one or two components at the same time or you are making some kind of RAD on a big project and over 4.5 milion lines of code (I agree that could be quite difficult)?

Bruno

It's a large CIS/Billing (and mobile care, IVR integration, online care, workorders, outage managment, cashiering, countless others) system that runs many major US cities electric, water, gas (and other services) billing. It's a J2EE application with a Swing client as well as several web components on Tomcat - It has over 500 entry screens, 400 reports and 50 processes - it's a completley layered architecture and everything from data access to user entry screens is pluggable. It supports a custom data access layer that exceeds the capabilities and performance J2EE CMP or BMP in every aspect. It's completely distributable, clusterable and fault tolerent.

It's also a development tool at it's foundation - it's basically VB for Java called Mercury (the developer tools). The system builds itself with developer assistance.

The software sells for between 800K and 1.2 Million US a shot - we are currently doing 25Milliion US a year in revenue from it with 65% profitability.

It's been evaluated by industry analysts and called "possibly the most technologically advanced CIS system ever developed".

Yeah, jCreator it is good wend you have slow computer (since it is C++) there is no startup impact and no need to tweak a JVM

Quote

also it is a good IDE for people that want to just code simple stuff with not to many wizards, it has a solid feature set (all the basic components are there) but i would not recommend it for everybody

My opinion is a bit different, I will strongly recomend It

I think that heavy IDE hide too much things (like VisualBasic). It also help people to make dirty and incompatible code, It is always good to know what your code do really.

If your project is well designed, you should have only small informations transactions between its entities, and those components will be small and interchangeable. this will enable you to divide your main project in smaller projects and that recursively.

All those little projects can be handle with any kind of editor and for me the simplest (with nevertheless some functions) is the most attractive.

The design of your application is much more important than the editor you use. If you cannot make a project with a simple editor, this means that your project is maybe not well designed.

To finish, I will say that I know that Eclipse is a good IDE, but, starting to learn Java with it is really the worst thing to do.

Bruno

Yes you should always know your code and using an IDE will only make you learn more, because of the tools like profilers, and debuggers, etc... but lets face it most people don't like (because there is nothing creative to do) in plumbing code and that’s wend IDEs come in handy to enhance productivity and do some of the plumbing code for you, but then again you need to use the right tools for the right job (BTW i don't know why people always bash Visual Basic sometimes it is the best tool for the job and i have no problem working with it, it has very good RAD tools and allows for very fast prototyping).

If you are learning java then you should focus on the language, and most of the stuff you will be doing can be done with a text editor and javac, there is no need to use a full featured IDE like Eclipse/NB/Intellij/JBuilder, etc… but once you start doing refactoring, working in a team environment (Versioning, collab, etc…), working with large projects, the need for an IDE becomes evident, I love IDEs they save me time and effort, and the harder the task the more I like the fact that the IDE has features that will save me time, and make the project more manageable.

"possibly the most technologically advanced CIS system ever developed"

Ok it is really a huge project! and I was not so wrong when I said that you write something like XP2 ;-)

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It has over 500 entry screens

I was meaning, you are not working on all parts of your project at the same time, and, the work you do day by day could be made by any editor, except if your compagny has chosen an IDE, and you are now blocked by it specific IDE project format, that is the trap I see in heavy IDE.

I use different kind of IDE for my job, and last time I have worked with Java it was with Versata Studio: and projects I made with it cannot be used by other Java IDE (It also create a huge code and really hard to understand, and, out of that IDE it is impossible to change anything, so the project depends on it). I dont think it is really good.

I dont know very well eclipse, but, can you easily continue your project if eclipse died tomorrow replaced by another IDE even more powerful ?

I dont know very well eclipse, but, can you easily continue your project if eclipse died tomorrow replaced by another IDE even more powerful ?

Actually, yes you can - I let the developers use whatever IDE they like. Most use Eclipse, a few use NetBeans and one fellow is a die hard IdeaJ fan (it is also very good). Several developers use both Eclipse and NetBeans. There is no project format that you are stuck with in any of them. They are all code based, so you just point the IDE at the directory and then use whichever you want. The odd time we still edit a thing or two in Notepad

I currently use JCreator, i started learning java with it because it was free and fast and i havent moved on yet. Im seriously considering Eclipse tho, It just look so much more powerfull.

This is offtopic but why do IDE's such as JCreator load all your classes at startup, it takes ages. Could it not just remember which ones were used last and most often and open them. Actaully I gues eclipse must do this, Loading 5 million lines of code might take a while...

Eclipse keeps a local cache of the code hierarchy and relations which it loads at startup prety quickly - even with 4.5 million lines it loads up fast and you can CTRL-O search the code base with the same speed as if you have 45 lines

-delete a source file use it, but the compiled class file is not removed: this means that you wont get errors when u should when compiling

-just try this: do a search and replace, and then undo it.*

*how can u undo a search and replace and be sure to get back to what u started with

plus it is not open source, i would not be caught using anything other than an open source IDE these days for doing java programming. on the other hand we have intellij that has a pretty good community feedback big fix cycle so there you go, my knowledge of the JCreator (LE version is freeware) is not great i only evaluated it a couple of times and it alwyas looked a bit limited compared to other IDEs that are available in a open source license.

What i like about OSS, especially the NB community is that you send an issue and most of the times you get a bug fix in the next daily build (it works almost like having your own tools team working for you), and if you need to create/modify the code for your own needs (and this happens allot) you can go in and change the code.

one of the most annoying thing in netbeans is garbage collection, you are writiing some peace of code and soudenly everything freeaze, especialy when i had only 128 mb of ram, now i have 256 but i do not see any diffrence, but eclipde is the best, than for it swt gui lib so everything is really fast and free jdt java compiler, eclipse is my favortite

You still only have half of the memory you should have (at minimum). Java IDEs tend to need a lot of memory.

These days as a developer I would go for 1GB RAM at least. Non-developers can probably get away with 512MB still.. but even those days are numbered. All the fancy digital cameras with the pixel count rising, video editing becoming more common etc... even the standard consumer needs much more RAM to work comfortably these days.

i will upgrade my computer in about half year time, i could by more memory but i have old intel pc board that uses first rambus memory and as you can think the price of rimm modules are quite high, but 256 mb is enough for me, well i must use rambooster to free some ram , but it is ok, well one year ago i was using netbeans with 128mb so you could imagine how the codding process was annoing, at that time i switched to eclipse and i probably stay with it.

I've used NetBeans pretty well since day one. I was seduced by Eclipse for a while but still prefer Nb at the end of the day.

If you're writing Swing GUIs (and despite a lot of FUD, Swing is no slower than SWT and a damn sight more flexible and repurposable) then Nb's form designer is the bee's knees - and even better now with Matisse. All of my GUI on top of JOGL is Swing and it works a treat - particularly when you want it to stop looking like a desktop app.

Eclipse is better if Java is just part of your problem - I still use Eclipse for C/C++ work (mostly for the irony of developing for C in a Java IDE). Eclipse overcomes one long standing annoyance of Nb - it supports multiple run targets - whereas Nb *still* believes a Java project has only one main class (probably because most of the core users are webapp/EE devs).

I Like Netbeans cause its cool and easy to work with and I like the nice simple design. I used to use Eclipse after I wanted to get out of programming in dos + notepad. But I dont know it might of been just me, but It seemed like I was getting a warning for everything, wouldnt of been suprised if it would of told me "Warning: Don't you think fluffy is a better name for posx?".

I find Eclipses Computer Asssisted Engineering/Refactoring just a bit more natural and intuitive then netbeans still. And on a proejct with a large source base, thats important to me.

OTOH Netbeans has a kick ass profiler. I have yet to find a decent one that is free and not a bear and a halkf to install for netbeans. They **really** over-built that testing/profiling base platform they use for their own profiler...

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